Pandemics and Change

November 30, 2020 Chris Edgelow

Pandemics and Change

These are unique times of increasing instability. We are nearing the one-year mark of this global pandemic and there is no end in sight.

Communicable diseases are as old as mankind. The shift from hunting and gathering to the agricultural era 10,000 years ago created communities where major disease outbreaks became epidemics. The march of civilization along trade routes crossing geopolitical borders allowed epidemics to spread beyond a country’s border, becoming a pandemic.

A Historical Perspective

Pandemics have contributed to major social and cultural changes throughout history. Rarely do the pandemics create the actual changes themselves. Rather, they act as a highlighter of conditions that already exist and an accelerator of changes that are slowly unfolding. The pandemic simply speeds things up.

The 6th Century Justinian Plague is thought to have killed 30 – 50 million people across Europe or roughly half the global population at the time. It is blamed for the true end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Dark Ages.
Between 1347 and 1351 the first wave of the Bubonic Plague swept Europe killing approximately 25 million people. It took 200 years for population levels to return to previous levels.

As ships returned to Eastern Mediterranean ports from their trading journeys to Asia, they were crewed by plague ridden sailors along with the rats and fleas that unknowingly carried the disease. Cautious local governments passed laws requiring these ships to anchor offshore or go to small nearby islands in “quarantino” for 40 days. Unfortunately, almost everyone was dead by the time their quarantine was up. Nonetheless, the disease found its way to the mainland and spread rapidly. Numerous waves of the pandemic continued to wash over Europe, Asia, and North Africa for decades.

The working poor in the existing Feudal System were hit the hardest. Their deaths created a massive labor shortage. Remaining workers demanded and received better payment and working conditions. This labor shortage created the fall of the Feudal System, paving the way for the Renaissance.

More attention was paid to public sanitation and health. The first Boards of Health were established. Hospitals established different wards or sections. Broken bones and wounds were separated from diseases.

Physical distancing and wearing masks were seen as useful tools to curb the spread of the plague. Small narrow windows were cut into the walls of homes in cities like Florence, Italy to serve as a passageway for wine sellers to sell their products without physical contact. 400 years later, many of these windows are again in use to sell and distribute everything from wine to coffee to gelato.

Ironically, the Bubonic Plague was never fully eradicated. Every year between one and three thousand cases are reported to the World Health Organization. Fortunately, modern antibiotics prevent death if people get medical attention early enough.

Smallpox became the plague of the 15th through 17th centuries. It killed up to 90% of Indigenous populations in the Americas, as Europeans explored and colonized the New World, intentionally spreading the disease through trade goods such as infected blankets. This had a major impact on Native Peoples ability to resist this colonization.
The Yellow Fever outbreak in 1807 at the French colony of St. Dominique (now Haiti) killed 50,000 French troops, forcing withdrawal from the region. It pushed Napoléon to sell 855,000 square miles of French Territory to then US President Thomas Jefferson. This transaction became known as the Louisiana Purchase and cost a mere $15 million.
The 1918 flu pandemic that killed 20 – 50 million people worldwide led to serious rethinking of public health policies. Preventative, centralized medicine focused on occupational and social conditions aimed at prevention and fostering wellness. Mask wearing was mandatory in San Francisco. Those that did not comply faced fines, imprisonment and having their names published in the newspaper as ‘mask slackers’.

The Current Challenge

Since the dawn of mankind, diseases have been, for the most part, buried deep in remote places, out of reach of people. The Earth’s natural defense systems were able to fight them off or keep them in their isolated locations. Sporadic outbreaks such as those listed above did occur with significant consequences. However, over the past several decades, the situation has been changing.

Today, our warming climate is disrupting these natural defense systems. Reckless deforestation and the aggressive conversion of jungles and wetlands for agriculture, along with economic and urban expansion, are opening the gates for the spread of disease. This loss of habitat is one of the principal drivers of the greatest and fastest loss of species diversity in the history of the planet. A healthy biodiversity is critical to the delicately balanced safety net of all natural systems. As diversity wanes, the balance is upset. Remaining species are more vulnerable to human influences. Humans are more vulnerable to the pathogens coming from these disrupted species.

While larger animals usually suffer significant decline, smaller species such as rodents, bats, mosquitoes, and ticks are more resilient. They adapt to people. Warmer temperatures and higher rainfalls increase the range these smaller species occupy, bringing them into urban areas with calamitous results:

In 1999 parts of Panama saw 3X’s more rainfall than normal. Rat populations exploded. So did the viruses rats carry, increasing the chances those viruses could jump to people. That same year a fatal lung disease transmitted through the saliva, feces and urine of rats and mice called hantavirus pulmonary syndrome emerged in Panama for the first time.
First discovered in Uganda in 1937, the mosquito born West Nile Virus appeared in the Northern Hemisphere in New York City in 1999, after a prolonged period of high temperatures followed by heavy rains.
Discovered in 1976 in a village near the Ebola River in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the virus named after the river occurred primarily in Central Africa. However, the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa began in rural southeastern Guinea, transmitted by fruit bats. It rapidly spread to urban areas, across borders and within months became a pandemic killing more than 11 thousand people, primarily in continental Africa.
Late in 2019, the virus known as COVID-19 is believed to have originated from the horseshoe bat, a species that has roamed the earths forests for 40 million years and currently thrives in the remote jungles of southern China. Massive urbanization has encroached into those jungles over the past few decades, disrupting the biodiversity and significantly increasing the interaction between those disease-ridden bats and people. As of this writing, more than 64 million cases have been confirmed world-wide and more than 1.4 million people have died. These numbers continue to surge upward.

The Road Ahead

Pandemics can act as an x-ray or MRI of society, exposing the broken, unhealthy places that require attention if any forward progress is possible. They hold a mirror up so we can see what is happening and who we really are as a local, national, and global society.

Rarely do pandemics create major change. They usually act as accelerators of underlying conditions and trends, highlighting their importance and the consequences of continuing to ignore them.

Currently there are numerous trends and conditions, some very recent and others that have been unfolding for several years:

An unprecedented level of global debt which has increased dramatically as governments try to mitigate the economic impact of this pandemic.
An increasing level of economic and racial inequality.
Several centuries of reliance on fossil fuels as the primary energy source around the world.
A global climate system that is rapidly warming and becoming increasingly unstable with extreme weather events becoming far more frequent.
An increasing isolation from prolonged physical distancing that prevents us from rubbing shoulders with the greater communities we inhabit in coffee shops, pubs, sporting events, parks, churches – everywhere we usually gather as we live our lives.
Education institutions at all levels that have been set up for an approach to learning that is rapidly disappearing.
The retail industry is under siege. The massive surge in online shopping and closure of many retailers, large and small, are examples.
Fundamental shifts in the world of work impacting how and where work gets done.
A fragile economic system dependent on growth in consumption, debt, energy use, and rising populations.
The failure of government institutions to respond to, let alone anticipate, crises.

Perhaps this current pandemic will serve as a driver of mental renewal. This time of isolation continues to be a moment of reflection, rest and turmoil, renewal, and fear.

Perhaps we will listen to one another more closely as a way to think anew both individually and collectively. Yet we see too many examples of irrational ways of thinking being strengthened. We witness horrible attacks of unreason supported by a denial of science and facts.

This time provides an opportunity for a collective shift in focus, perhaps even a change of heart. It can be an opening of possibilities critically important to a shared future where our world can thrive.

Often shifts created by pandemics are not immediately recognized when they happen. Only the gift of hindsight yields the prospective necessary to understand what actually happened. Perhaps people looking back at this time from 50 years in the future will see the actual changes that broke our addiction to fossil fuels as the predominate energy source. Maybe our great-grandchildren will learn this was the time when major steps were taken globally to turn climate change around. Or the time when lasting solutions to economic and racial inequality came about.

This current pandemic is not the last one we will face. A new emerging disease surfaces several times a year. One study estimates there are 3,200 strains of corona virus that already exist in bats, waiting for an opportunity to jump to people.

This pandemic has irrevocably exposed severe weaknesses in our social and economic systems. Can this be a ‘black swan’ event that drives us to create a better, more sustainable world for everyone? There is no turning back now. We can only go forward. We must create a new normal.

We have many possible futures ahead of us. We could choose to ignore perhaps the most pressing problem facing our society: the unprecedented tension between self-interest and the greater good. We could choose to keep turning toward self-interest. We could settle into a world of slow, plodding economic growth, increasing natural disasters, and rising inequality.

Or we can embrace these challenges – which cross all borders – as a spur to true global cooperation and action. We can choose to act forcefully, using our yet untapped global capacity to make massive new investments to ensure a healthy environment populated by resilient people with the skills and security they need to thrive in this age of bewildering change.

We do not need to arrive at new solutions. We need the personal and collective will to implement the solutions we already have.